the funny thing about high score runs is that it's actually about fighting as inefficiently as possible. you want to score a lot of very low-power hits in short, quick bursts. Doing too much damage will just mean less total hits that you can land on an opponent, and specialty moves are usually too hard to string together into usable combos (plus, they do too much damage), so based on my model, ideally the only attacks you would perform would be the close punch and ground kick. An intent strategist would examine the combo point totals to find when the best place to break off combos is, because of the decreased value of Mega Combo in comparison to 3x and 4x, but I never really got to that point.

Count Roland wrote:because when you cheat it makes the level score zero.

I never really got into level editing, so I may be wrong here, but wouldn't it be possible to replace the original challenge levels with one that had, say, 9 wolves, then run it without debug mode enabled? Admittedly, beating the level (especially in a score run) would be a very difficult feat, but it would allow for higher points.

that's true you could do that, or if you were really crazy you could edit the template for the letters and numbers and stuff so that all the numbers other than zero read as nine or something, though I haven't seen anyone do that. somehow I doubt anyone cares enough about the high scores to try either of those things.